New tech could help prevent hot car deaths

1of3Friends and family embrace after participating in a balloon release for 3-year-old Raymond Pryer who died after being left in a daycare van for more than four hours July 20, 2018 in Houston. (Michael Ciaglo / Houston Chronicle)Photo: Michael Ciaglo, Staff / Houston Chronicle

2of3Friends and family participate in a balloon release for 3-year-old Raymond Pryer who died after being left in a daycare van for more than four hours July 20, 2018 in Houston. (Michael Ciaglo / Houston Chronicle)Photo: Michael Ciaglo, Staff / Houston Chronicle

3of3A closed sign is taped to the door at Discovering "ME" Academy July 20, 2018 where 3-year-old Raymond Pryer died after being left in a daycare van for more than four hours. (Michael Ciaglo / Houston Chronicle)Photo: Michael Ciaglo, Staff / Houston Chronicle

Already this summer, three Texas children have died from heatstroke inside a parked vehicle, including a 3-year-old boy in northwest Houston last week. And as a heat wave over the region continues, there are steps parents can take to ensure their child’s safety, thanks to ever-evolving technology.

“There are so many devices for this. We get contacted by inventors every single day,” said Amber Rollins, director of KidsAndCars.Org, a nonprofit dedicated to children’s safety in and around vehicles.

“It ranges from after-market devices to sensor-based technology that comes in several car seats,” she said. Reminders are also being integrated by car manufacturers.

Most of the technology focuses on reminding parents that a child may be in the car after the ignition is turned off. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, half of children’s heatstroke deaths in cars occur when a caregiver unintentionally leaves a child in the vehicle.

On average, there are 37 such deaths across the U.S. each year, a number that has held relatively steady for the past couple decades. And consumer product companies believe that reminders can keep these incidents from happening.

At Cybex, a car-seat company, “SensorSafe” technology integrated into the seat connects the chest buckle with a car’s Bluetooth system.

“Once the chest clip is closed, it establishes a Bluetooth connection,” said Erica Jutzin, director of marketing for the company. When a driver cuts the ignition, a series of chimes will sound through the car’s dashboard and a notification will pop up on their connected cell phone. If the chest clip hasn’t been unfastened within four minutes, the driver will receive another alert, as will any emergency contacts loaded into the accompanying app.

“On the phone itself, you can ignore or acknowledge. It’s an action you have to take yourself, to say ‘I saw this alert, and I’m going to take care of it.’ And then when you unbuckle the belt, it breaks the Bluetooth connection,” Jutzin said.

Currently the feature is available on Cybex’s Sirona model, which retails at $329.99, and came out earlier this year. It’s also been available on several seats from Cybex’s sister company, Evenflo, for a few years.

Car manufacturers are now incorporating similar systems. Last year, General Motors introduced a rear-seat reminder system to more than 20 models.

“Rear-seat reminder is a great way to be aware that during the beginning of your trip, at one point, you opened the rear door for some reason, and at your destination, your vehicle will give you a notification that you opened the door and remind you to check it,” said Suzanne Johansson, a safety engineer at Chevrolet. “It’s a great way to remind us during a busy day or a busy drive, and bring us back to center.”

The reminder first came out in GM’s 2017 line; it’s standard on 10 Chevrolet models, while offered as an add-on on others.

For those who aren’t considering buying a new car seat or vehicle, there are other solutions.

In 2016, the navigational app Waze added a “Child Reminder” feature. When the feature is activated, a notification will pop up at the end of a driver’s trip, showing the Waze logo sucking on a pacifier with a notification to “Check your car before you leave.” It’s easy and free, to add the notification to the app, by switching on the capability to allow reminders in the app’s general settings.

“The number one thing that parents need to do is look before you walk,” Rollins said. “And what that means is that you want to open the back door and check that back seat every single time you park your vehicle, without fail — even if you’re not the person who typically drives your child. Because it’s often when we’re out of our routine that these accidents happen. The biggest struggle is getting parents to understand and believe that this could happen to them.”

To help build this habit, she recommends tucking your phone in the back seat, near your child’s seat.

“It’s not that my cell phone is more important than my baby, but I have to access my phone for literally everything,” she said. “I can’t get through my work morning without my cell phone.”

A few moments without it would trigger her to go back to the car to retrieve it, Rollins said. And a few minutes is often all the time a parent could have in a situation in which a child is left inside a hot car.

The average temperature rise is 3.2 degrees for every five minutes on a sunny day. And 80 percent of the temperature increase happens in the first 10 minutes. Even with windows cracked, temperatures can reach 125 degrees, putting children — and pets — at risk within minutes.

“I think a lot of people out there can relate to turning their car off and sitting there for just a minute, and feeling really hot, really fast,” Rollins said. “And then combine that with the fact that a child’s body temperature rises three to five times faster than an adult’s, because their little bodies just can’t regulate heat the way we can.”

Maggie Gordon is the assistant features editor at the Houston Chronicle, where she has worked since 2015.

Before joining the Chronicle, Maggie worked at papers in Connecticut, including the Stamford Advocate and the Greenwich Time, covering a variety of beats, from general assignment and municipal coverage to education, demographics and business reporting including real estate trends and the hedge fund industry. She is a graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

Greatest hits include a narrative about alligator hunting in a Texas bayou, a horse trainer's quest to tame a wild mustang in one summer, and a feature about the inmates in a transgender tank for sex workers in Houston's county jail. She loves quirky characters and stories that combine adventure and humanity. Bonus points if it unearths a love story.